Read an article about Yasmany Tomas from before he signed with the Diamondbacks, and most of them will say something along the same lines about his profile. The power was thought to be real, maybe a 70 on the 20-80 scale; the contact skills might be uncertain; and while the arm could potentially be a plus, it was far from certain where he he’d fit on the defensive map.

That’s evident, really, in just how those reports described his position. In September, Kiley McDaniel listed him as a left fielder. In October, Baseball America’s Ben Badler said that he “had the defensive attributes to fit in either corner spot.” After Tomas signed with Arizona, Keith Law also talked about him as a corner outfielder. Dave Cameron even noted that “some teams felt that he profiled more as a DH.” Other than a few tossed-off occasional mentions that he’d played some small amount of first and third earlier in his youth — 30 games at third in 2008, primarily —  just about no one expected him to be an infielder.

Except for the Diamondbacks, that is. Due in part to their own evaluations of him, in part due to a crowded outfield, and in part due to a third base situation unstable enough that longtime second baseman Aaron Hill played his first games since 2005 at the position last year, Arizona almost immediately announced that they’d like Tomas to play third base.

It’s March 11, so we’re not going to pretend that we’ve seen enough of Tomas to make a determination as to whether he can handle the position or not. But we haven’t seen nothing, either, and considering where he came from, it’s the first time most of us are able to see real actual game video of him. Considering how the Diamondbacks are set up, where he ends up is going to have a ripple effect on the rest of the lineup. Read the rest of this entry »

Last July, Rockies owner Dick Monfort earned some well-deserved ridicule by indicating that his team wouldn’t consider trading 33-year-old free-agent-to-be Jorge De La Rosa, despite the fact that Colorado was well on its way to a 96-loss season and De La Rosa is, all things considered, pretty mediocre and not even that durable. The owner’s money quote: de la Rosa “has won our last three,” without noting that the three wins had required 21 Colorado games to attain. According to a Peter Gammons report, Monfort killed a potential deal that would have sent De La Rosa to Baltimore for Eduardo Rodriguez, who was instead swapped to Boston for Andrew Miller and has impressed so much since that he ranked No. 23 overall on Kiley McDaniel’s recent Top 200 Prospects list.

While Rockies fans cringe at that thought and pray that Gammons’ information was incorrect, the Rockies instead gave De La Rosa two more years and $25 million in September. Considering that the team’s major additions this winter were minor pieces like Daniel Descalso, Kyle Kendrick, John Axford, Nick Hundley, and David Hale, it’s looking like another season of praying that this is the year that Troy Tulowitzki and Carlos Gonzalez stay healthy at the same time, while hoping that young arms Jon Gray and Eddie Butler can contribute.

While it’s difficult to see a scenario where the Rockies break through this year, it’s perhaps even more difficult to see De La Rosa still being around to contribute to the next good Colorado team. But while Monfort’s direction and baseball sense may have been misguided, he’s not wrong about one thing: “he pitches great here,” and in a sport where finding any pitcher who can be anything other than awful in Coors Field has proven terribly difficult, maybe that’s not such a meaningless thing to have.

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What you probably already know is that next winter’s free agent starting pitching crop has the potential to be historic, not only due to the amount of talent currently unsigned beyond 2015 but for the hundreds of millions of dollars they’ll surely command. With the obvious caveat that extensions for some of these guys are possible before they hit the market, just bask in the names entering the final years of their contracts.

There’s David Price, and Jeff Samardzija, and Johnny Cueto. Over there, you’ve got Rick Porcello and Mark Buehrle and Doug Fister. Next to them, Jordan Zimmermann and Yovani Gallardo and Scott Kazmir. Say hi, Mike Leake and Hisashi Iwakuma and Mat Latos, and also Justin Masterson and Kyle Lohse. There’s Bud Norris and Ian Kennedy and Wei-Yin Chen out there as well, to say nothing of the near-certainty that Zack Greinke exercises that opt-out.

It’s a simply stunning collection of names, and it’s going to make the July trading season fascinating, as well as provide Philadelphia even more incentive to move Cole Hamels while they can. Lefties, righties, young, old, flamethrowers, junkballers, whatever you want in a pitcher, you’ll be able to find it on the menu.

Oh, and there’s also Tim Lincecum. Hi, Tim Lincecum. Read the rest of this entry »

Don’t screw this up, Marco Estrada. Just don’t.

That’s not how you’d expect an article about a team that’s clearly trying to contend in 2015 would start, and you’ll understand why it does a little later on. There’s only ever been one article focusing on Estrada on the front page of FanGraphs, and that came back in 2012. This isn’t going to be another. I promise. This is maybe going to be about the fun mark the Blue Jays could potentially set if Estrada never makes a start for them this season, and what that might mean for the playoff dreams. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, Nick Punto informed the Diamondbacks that he’d be taking the year off, deciding not to report to camp even though he had signed a minor league contract with the club earlier this winter. Though he claimed he wasn’t retiring, Punto is 37 and just put up a 73 wRC+ for Oakland, so it’s easy to imagine that his career is over. Despite his small stature and non-existent power, Punto managed to turn a solid glove, positional versatility, and a good eye (career 10.4% walk rate) into a career that spanned parts of 14 seasons.

He found himself as the tongue-in-cheek face of one of the most shocking transactions in baseball history — 2012’s “Nick Punto trade,” which you might remember more for including Adrian Gonzalez, Josh Beckett, Carl Crawford, and a quarter-billion dollars worth of contracts — and carved himself a niche as baseball’s foremost jersey-shredding expert. As far as careers go, you could do a lot worse than all that, not to mention the approximately $23 million he made during his playing days.

Wait! Don’t go anywhere. This isn’t going to be a full Nick Punto career retrospective. I swear. What this is going to be is a hope, a prayer, that Punto’s probable departure from the game takes along with it one of baseball’s most frustrating blights, the thing that he might be known for above all else: the head-first slide, particularly into first base.

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Despite all the gains advanced stats have made in gaining public acceptance over the years, there’s always going to be some cases that seem inexplicable to one side or the other. Jason Heyward is generally a good example of that, because if you still rely on traditional stats, you see a right fielder who hit .271 with 11 homers and 58 RBI and consider him a disappointment. If you believe in defensive metrics and understand the effects of age and the current offensive environment, you see a star who just put up a 5 WAR season at age 24 and could command a $200 million contract in free agency next winter.

One thing isn’t really disputable, however: Heyward hasn’t really delivered on the offensive promise he showed by putting up a 134 wRC+ at 20 in his rookie season of 2010. It was one of the finest age-20 seasons in baseball dating back to 1900, and everyone on the list ahead of him — with the exception of Dick Hoblitzel, who had his career cut short by World War I — ended up becoming either an inner-circle Hall of Famer or is a more recent player well on his way there.

Heyward followed up that smashing debut with a disappointing 96 wRC+ in 2011, due in part to a right shoulder injury, then put up three straight seasons in the 110-121 wRC+ range. While that all sounds similar, how he’s made it there hasn’t been. Heyward’s power has decreased — homers down from 27 to 14 to 11, slugging percentage down from .479 to .427 to .384 — while his on-base skills have improved, going from .335 to .349 to .351. It’s still valuable, it’s just a different kind of valuable, and not what we might have expected a few years ago.

So maybe this is what Heyward is now, and maybe that’s just fine. But to listen to Heyward himself, he seems to think he knows where the power has gone, and how he can get it back. Here’s two different bits from a St. Louis Post-Dispatch story on Sunday morning: Read the rest of this entry »

Each year, it seems, there’s a hot new Cuban making an impact in the big leagues. In 2011, we got our first full season of Aroldis Chapman. In 2012, it was Yoenis Cespedes in Oakland. The next year, Jose Fernandez and Yasiel Puig finished 1-2 for the NL Rookie of the Year. In 2014, Jose Abreu won the AL version for the White Sox, while the Red Sox and Cubs got brief late looks at Rusney Castillo and Jorge Soler, respectively. This winter, we’ve already seen the Diamondbacks pick up Yoan Lopez and Yasmany Tomas, and we’re currently waiting to see just how mind-blowing the bonuses Yoan Moncada and Hector Olivera (among others) will wring out of rich, talent-hungry teams.

Cubans in baseball aren’t exactly a new phenomenon, of course. According to Baseball-Reference’s Play Index, 185 Cuban-born players have taken at least one plate appearance since the start of the 20^th century. That includes some very well-known names like Luis Tiant, Rafael Palmeiro, Jose Canseco, and Tony Perez, as well as more recent non-elite starter types including Adeiny Hechavarria, Yunel Escobar, Yasmani Grandal, and Yonder Alonso. And also, Yuniesky Betancourt!

Much has been written, here and elsewhere, about the reasons why. Baseball keeps restricting access to spend on young, non-union talent. Cuba’s evolving political situation has made it something of an untapped pipeline. The consistent recent jackpots on these largely unknown Cuban players – remember, when Puig was signed, the reaction was largely, “wait, who?” – have made teams more willing to jump into the market, and the prices, it seem, keep going up.

That will be the trend until one of these players busts, that is, and that’s generally been the feeling around these investments. They keep working, so why not? Which is fine, except that we’ve already seen two relatively expensive Cuban imports well on their way down that “this isn’t going to work” path, and I’m not talking about Dayan Viciedo or Yunesky Maya.  I’m talking about Dodger infielders Alex Guerrero and Erisbel Arruebarrena, who combined to receive $53 million from the team last winter, and who currently couldn’t possibly find themselves less in the team’s plans. Read the rest of this entry »

We often hear the Cardinals being described as one of the best organizations in baseball for their ability to consistently put a winning product on the field, and that’s a reputation that they’ve earned though consistent excellence. It never seems that the Tigers get talked about in quite the same way, but perhaps that’s unfair. In the nine seasons since and including 2006, when the two met in the World Series, the Tigers have won 790 games. The Cardinals have won 789. The Tigers have made five playoff trips and suffered one losing season; the Cardinals have made six playoff trips and suffered one losing season.

If there’s a difference, maybe it’s that the Cardinals have two rings in that span while the Tigers haven’t yet made it to the top, or maybe we just perceive them differently because the Tigers were absolutely dreadful for most of the two decades preceding their recent run. But the real difference is that the Cardinals seem to continually reinforce themselves from a deep and talented farm system, while the Tigers have continually made win-now moves to add more talent around their iconic duo of Miguel Cabrera and Justin Verlander.

Needless to say, that’s a considerable difference in team-building philosophies, and it’s not a cycle that can last forever. We’re already seeing cracks in the core due to injuries and aging, and we haven’t seen a lot of coming from within to help support that. That’s not to say the Tigers are done, of course; they’ve won four division titles in a row, and they may very well win a fifth in 2015, even though their offseason was more than a little uneven (more on that in a minute). But more and more you start to wonder how long the window remains open, and while that’s not an unfair question — I asked this same question back in late 2013, after the Tigers lost to the Red Sox in the ALCS — what I want to know is, what happens here when the window closes? Read the rest of this entry »

The other night on Twitter, I put out one of those early-February thoughts that can’t really be properly explained in a mere 140 characters: Rick Porcello is going to make more than $100 million next year, and people are going to freak out about that.

Needless to say, I received some interesting replies to that, because the second part’s pretty easy to understand. Porcello’s generally seen as a decent enough pitcher, but one who doesn’t miss bats or prevent runs like his peripherals say that he should, and he’s usually not been among the top three pitchers on his own team. (That he’s been teammates with Max Scherzer, Justin Verlander, David Price, Anibal Sanchez, and Doug Fister generally gets left out of that last point.)

James Shields, who has had something like seven seasons better than Porcello’s best, just very recently couldn’t get to $80 million. Porcello’s going to top that? Well, okay then. I guess I need to back this up. Let’s run through this and see if it’s crazy. Spoiler alert: It might be crazy.

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Last week, I had the pleasure of being present at a panel of baseball people talking about 2015’s big stories, and one of the questions was, “are the Padres contenders?” Some said yes. Others said no. Most of the discussion centered on the rebuilt outfield of Justin Upton, Matt Kemp, and Wil Myers, mainly about how that could possibly come together on defense. Now, we’re hearing about how they may yet be the team that comes away with James Shields, who would inject some stability into what is a talented-but-fragile rotation.

Jeff will have more on that signing later, but obviously: Shields will help! Adding him makes for a rotation front four of Shields, Andrew Cashner, Ian Kennedy, and Tyson Ross, which is potentially pretty impressive. More innings from Shields means fewer that you need to rely upon from Odrisamer Despaigne, Josh Johnson and Brandon Morrow, and that’s a good thing. Signing Shields and trading for Cole Hamels would help! Lots of things, likely and less so, would help. Here’s what I had wanted to ask that panel, though, especially those who believe that the reworked Padres are now contenders: How many people can actually name all four Padres starting infielders?

Obviously there’s a bit of hyperbole there, but the point is that this isn’t a question you want to be asking about a team that wants to be included in the October conversation. If you didn’t follow the team closely, would you be able to come up with Yonder Alonso, Jedd Gyorko, Alexi Amarista, and Will Middlebrooks off the top of your head? Because this group, despite returning only one player who took more than 50% of the plate appearances at the same position last season, doesn’t look good. It’s actually a considerable issue, if you look at Steamer’s 2015 projections combined with our curated depth chart playing time inputs:

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